


make all of the bad men run

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Framework Universe (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 20:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11342928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: “For how long,” she asks, willing her voice not to shake with the question.“Since we crossed over."





	make all of the bad men run

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'd.
> 
> Anyways, y'all know I'll take any excuse to write Framework!Fitz.

They’re captured by Hydra when it happens.

An accident, a fluke, a casual slip up.

But it’s something enough to give her pause. 

Tied up back to back with Fitz waiting for an extraction team and everything just seems to slow down. Metaphorically of course, not literally. Literally she would have been fine with,  _ literally  _ would have been easier to cope with than listening to Fitz speak fluent Russian, sharp and direct, and while she may not have been able to understand his words she could understand his tone.

It was a tone that didn’t belong to Fitz.

Not her Fitz.

The last time she had heard it was back in the Framework, when he was ordering her onto her knees and -

It doesn’t seem so shocking when a few minutes later someone is hurriedly untying them.

He keeps speaking in Russian and suddenly the men are moving out of the way, deferring to him as if he was someone important, rather than the prisoners they had been moments before.

“Fitz, what is-”

“Trust me,” he says to her quickly.

And she does.

Of course she does, she’s always trusted him. 

So she lets him take the lead, forces herself not to act surprised as they’re let out, as they walk through the Hydra facility unharmed with nobody batting an eye at them. As if this is normal. 

None of this is normal. 

It’s only then, as the lights stream down illuminating the space, the extraction team finally coming that he breaks his act - the one that he had picked up the second she heard him speak Russian - suddenly turning back into the Fitz she knows as if someone had flipped a light switch.

All the familiar softness back on his features, though the hand that grips her arm just a bit too tight, belays that feeling of comfort - “Fitz?”

“Don’t tell anyone about this, they wouldn’t understand.” 

No, they wouldn’t.

She barely does. 

So she nods her head sharply, and reassures him, “Of course.”

 

*

 

Once she starts thinking about it she can’t stop. It’s there, all of it is. Evidence that she can compile together, things that she had excused blaming the Framework having lingering effects on his mind, but it was so much more.

The way he’s able to take a shot without hesitating and with perfect accuracy every time.

The way he looks sometimes like he wants to disregard Coulson’s orders during meetings.

The way he lingers at the edge of the training room whenever Daisy or Yo-Yo are in there almost anxious.

The way he holds himself, back straight, confident as he moves like a predator down the halls of the Playground.

The way he would sometimes push her up against the wall of their shared room and kiss her like she’s never been kissed before. 

“No,” she says, because she needs to say this outloud even if there’s no one to hear her, “That can’t, no.” 

As if knowing she was thinking of him, the door to their shared room opens a moment later.

She wonders if something shows on her face, it must clearly, because as the door shuts, he drops the appearance of the man she knows and shifting into something else. It is still Fitz’s face, but it’s the way he wears it, darker and dangerous. 

“So you’ve figured it out?”

Saying it, saying the words out loud, is like stealing all of the air from her lungs, “You’re not my Fitz, are you?”

“No,” he acknowledges.

A  _ no  _ that sinks down deep inside of her.

Consuming her.

A lead weight on her heart.

Her echoing, “No,” is so close to a sob, because that’s what she wants to do. 

She wants to cry.

It would so easy to, but she refuses to give in.

To show weakness in front of  _ him _ .

The Doctor.

The man from the Framework. 

“For how long,” she asks, willing her voice not to shake with the question. 

“Since we crossed over.

“And you’ve just been pretending this whole time to be our Fitz, to be  _ my  _ Fitz-” 

“Miss Simmons, I’ve been a trained double agent since I was sixteen years old,” he says, “If you think, I couldn’t pretend to be a weaker version of myself, then you’re sadly mistaken.” 

No. 

This couldn’t be.

All the evidence pointed to it except -

“You let us kill AIDA, if you really were that Fitz you wouldn’t have-”

“Her name is Ophelia, or was,” there’s something about the way he says it, sad almost, as if a monster could be sad. “The woman that came across was not my Ophelia, she was weak and a monster and not what I wanted for the woman I loved. Losing her helped to maintain my cover, at that point, I considered it a necessary sacrifice.” 

She never liked AIDA, not at all.

But her stomach twists at the callous way he says it all.

“You're a monster.” 

“I'm the man I was raised to be.”

The man he was raised to be.

By that man.

His father.

He'd told her before, back at the academy, how his father had always told him he wasn't good enough until one day he was just gone. 

She'd seen in the Framework how having that man - one who so clearly misunderstood Fitz, had changed him.

“I just can't believe. That this whole time you've been… and I never realized it.”

“You’re not the most observant, Miss Simmons-”

“Doctor,” she corrects instinctively, “It’s Doctor and you know it.”

He relents this holding out his hands in a minor peace offering. 

It does not appease  her.

If anything it makes her more angry.

She looks away from him, sharply, pointedly, regretting it a second later when her eyes fall on their bed. Still unmade from this morning and - 

“Oh God!”

“What now Miss Simmons?”

She doesn’t even bother to correct him, can’t because there’s a sinking feeling her chest. Tight suddenly, “We slept together.”

“Yes,” he says, sounding indifferent, uncaring. “You were very eager. I personally didn’t initiate if you remember, it was you that came on to me the first time.”

And yes it was. She had been so happy to have him back, needing to feel him to know that he was real and there, that she had kissed him and pushed for more than just kissing. It had been a hot night, charged, full of energy, passion that hadn’t been there before. She had known something was different but had thought it was just because he was back, not because… 

That had been months ago.

They’d been together frequently since then shared a bed both intimately and not.

How could she have shared a bed with this man and never realized - “I didn’t know that you weren’t my Fitz!”

Though maybe he was.

A little bit.

The way her was with her, the way he had been beside her these past few months, looking after her. He was tender sometimes, soft others, surely that was a sign that the man she loved was somewhere inside of there. May and Mack both had memories of their Framework lives as well as their real lives, maybe Fitz was in a similar situation. Caught between the two versions of himself, the evil one winning out.

She looks at him and thinks she can see it, the way he suddenly won’t meet her gaze, looking almost apologetic. 

“I could tell everyone.” 

“I’ve already proved to you that I’m a very good liar, Miss Simmons, I could pass a lie detector test,” he says, “Do you really want that to happen.”

“I-”

“No, you don’t,” he cuts her off. “You’re not going to tell anybody about this, and neither am. We’re going to go on pretend that everything is normal and happy and that there’s nothing rotten in the state of Denmark.” 

“Is that a Hamlet reference?”

“I’m well read,” he replies too quickly, “But that’s not the point.”

No, it’s not.

She knows the point.

She gets it and he’s right, she can’t say anything. Not unless she wants to lose Fitz forever. Her Fitz, who has to still be in there. If she says anything they’ll lock him up and then there’s no chance of ever getting the man she loves back, and Jemma can’t risk that.

She she nods her head, once and then twice.

Silently agreeing with this plan.

“You’re sleeping on the floor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we’ve shared the past three months I don’t see why-”

“You’re on the floor,” she says sharply, because on this point she will be firm. 

She’ll take what little of her dignity she has left.

 

*

 

The plan is to stage a break up, something dramatic and public, something that won’t make the rest of the team like at her in concern and worry and wonder why they want to sleep in separate rooms. 

The plan is a solid one, and it gives her comfort.

Until she’s there standing in the kitchen making tea and watching him. 

He pretends to be Fitz well, plays the part, but he’s not - she can tell he’s not now, can see the subtle cracks. 

The way he impatiently drums his fingers against the countertop as if bored with small talk. 

The way he carefully places two sugar cubes inside of his tea cup.

The way he places himself between her and Daisy in an almost protective stance, when she jokingly vibrates the table in order to knock something of Mack’s over.

It’s a joke.

The sort of thing that would get a laugh out of them before. 

Instead it has him holding onto her with a hand that shakes just slightly, angling himself as if to shield her. Daisy would never hurt them. She knows this, her Fitz would know this, but to him, she must be a monster.

“I’m fine,” she tells him, a soft undertone.

And he jerks his hand away from her as if burned, “Of course you are.”

He still watches her as they sit back down at the table, just as she watches him. Glancing up at each other every few moments. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking, can’t, and it bothers her more than she’d like to admit. 

Neither of them really contributes much to the conversation, Daisy talking about some upcoming mission with Mack. She knows she’s not normally this quiet, the Daisy would surely pick up on her lack of conversation, would mention it later when it was just the two of them.

But she can’t will herself to speak.

And it seems neither can he.

Until Daisy says, “Because apparently Coulson is the only one on the base that speaks German-”

“I speak German.” 

There’s silence at the table for a brief moment.

Mack recovers the quickest, “Oh yeah? Where’d you learn that?”

Fitz says, “At the Academy.”

At the same time as Daisy says, “Probably when he was a Nazi.”

And everything seems to freeze at once.

The resulting silence more oppressive than it was a moment before.

His eyes meet hers for a moment and they’re darker, any pretense at pretending to be  _ Fitz  _ slipping away as the seconds tick by. 

When he speaks, it is low and cold and she’s certain he’ll blow his cover right then and there - “Hydra has a legacy dating back since the ancient Greeks, just because one factions was-”

“Fuck,” Daisy cuts him off. 

A mistake.

Jemma can feel the tension rising again, and then just like that it stops, as Daisy speaks once more, “May said the same thing before.”

His, “What,” is controlled and tempered.

“We were in the meeting, before we rescued you two yesterday, and May said something about Hydra’s legacy. I guess I forget that you have all those memories too, that you all do?”

Mack shrugs, “It’s not so bad for me. I think sometimes I got lucky AIDA must have liked me.”

It’s a joke.

Said in a sort of half talking manner, but Fitz doesn’t react. 

Not in the way he should, not in the way he normally would.

She knows why now.

She can see it in the way he shrugs his shoulders in a manner that is more of a mimic of Mack than a real shrug.

But then he looks up at her, and for a second it’s not the dark look anymore, it’s softer and sadder and it reminder her of Fitz. Her Fitz, still somewhere inside of there, she just had to get him to come out again.

Surely, that was possible. 

Suddenly her carefully constructed plan doesn’t seem important anymore.

 

*

 

Things don’t get easier.

Time moves on, passes at an almost standstill, the two of them playing the part of normal people in public, while in private things fall apart.

“Fitz-”

“I hate that name,” he cuts her off. Cold and callous, dropping the act now that they're in their room. “At least here in private you could call me Leopold.”

“You hated that name.”

“ _ He  _ hated it,” Fitz corrects dismissively, “And why was that?”

“ _ You  _ said it reminded you of your father.”

She doesn't miss it, the way he stills, suddenly going darker. In this moment she could truly believe it was the man from the Framework sitting in front of her.

“I loved my father,” he says, low and cold, “Until you murdered him.”

“That wasn't, I didn't mean-”

“I wanted to kill you so badly, Miss Simmons-”

“Doctor,” she corrects even now.

“-I thought about often since coming here. Putting a pillow over your head in the middle of the night, making it look like an accident. But I can't,” he says sounding conflicted more than angry now, “Something stops me every time. Maybe a lingering sentiment from the man whose body I stole. An urge to protect that I haven't felt since Ophelia.” 

He had been like that in the kitchen the other day, protecting her from what he thought could have been an attack, looking out for her.

That gives her hope.

Proof that her Fitz is still in there.

That she can save him still.

She says that out loud, even though she knows he will deny it, “That's because the man I love is still in there.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “Was the Simmons of my world still there when you crossed over? Or was she deleted from existence just like with Skye?”

“I was dead.”

That gives him pause. Furrowing his brows together in a familiar way. “What?”

“I was dead AIDA-”

“Ophelia.”

“ _ AIDA _ had me killed before, some contamination at the academy that-”

His scoff cuts her off. 

“Oh yes, I remember that now. A purge of those still foolishly loyal to SHIELD.”

He points his thumb and finger to make a gun, presses it to the center of her head, a playful gesture. Something almost like that. 

She refuses to flinch back from it. 

“You know, Miss Simmons, I think I may have been the one to pull that trigger.”

 

*

 

She listens to him each night. Gasping, struggling to breathe, the panicked signs of a nightmare, but she does not comfort him as she might have before. She can’t not now that she knows. 

What has she done to deserve this?

A half shout noise follows that thought and even here like this she knows Fitz. She knows this man.

The sound of him stirring to wakefulness on the floor does not offer her comfort.

Her bed still feels as empty as her heart.

“What are your nightmares about?”

She hates to ask.

Hates that she is curious enough to.

His voice is heavy with sleep but he replies, “Why do you want to know?”

The million dollar question.

“Before they were always about the pod, about drowning. I used to have them too worried I couldn't save you but…” 

But this Fitz has no memories of that, of the pod, of anything they've been through together.

He seems to sense her unspoken questions.

“Ophelia dying usually, standing there unwilling to give up my cover to save her.”

“Oh.”

“My father too. Standing over his dead body or listening to that phone call and knowing I can't do anything.”

“I shouldn't have asked.”

“This time was about summer camp though.”

“Summer camp?”

He makes a sort of half laugh half pained noise. “He made me kill my dog. To prove that I didn't have attachments.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

She's not sure why she expected anything else.

“Do you have any happy memories from that world? Anything good at all?”

He's silent for a long moment.

Long enough that she doesn't expect an answer.

Long enough that she's about to roll over and go back to sleep.

“When I was fifteen I ran away from home,” he says. “It wasn't - I wasn't successful obviously. My father always had eyes on me, he was well connected in Hydra by then wouldn't risk losing his golden goose.”

“Golden egg,” Jemma corrects reflexively.

“What?”

“The geese laid golden eggs, they weren't golden themselves.”

When he laughs it's a sound is familiar. It is Fitz. Her Fitz. 

She hadn't realized how much she'd missed that sound until now.

“His golden egg,” he corrects. “In any case, I ran away, hitch hiked for a lot of it, saved up money to get to my mother’s house. I hadn't seen her since I was ten, when my father took me away. But she acted like a day hadn't passed and it was… I wanted to stay there forever.” 

“What happened? Did she-" Jemma can't find herself to finish the question. Almost afraid of the answer.

She'd met his mother many times. She was kind and treated Jemma like family and the thought of anything having happened to her even if it was just in the Framework.

No wonder he had been so different and dark in there.

“I left,” he says. “I left before anything could happen, and didn't go back for years.” 

“I'm sorry.”

“There's nothing to be sorry about,” he tells her, “It was a good memory. One of the few.”

They fall silent again after that. Still unable to sleep, she can hear his uneven breathing just as she can feel her own body now wide awake despite it being the middle of the night. 

Which is why when after a moment he says, “Tell me a good memory, Miss Simmons,” she does. 

 

*

 

He’s different, but he’s also the same.

The way he places his hands on his hips round table meetings.

The way he tips his head back in frustration when a project goes wrong.

The way he gets ahead of himself too much going on at once and never properly remembering to slow himself down  

The way he gives her a sort of half smile as their eyes meet across their shared lab space.

She wonders if she could love this man.

If getting her Fitz back was impossible then maybe. 

Just maybe.

It’s a brief thought, because the data in front of her, the project she’s currently working on shows a scan of his brain, the lines of code that AIDA had created, and she’s going to fix this. 

She has to.

“Jemma,” he calls her by her name here, in public. 

Her heart leaps briefly at the familiarity. 

She knows that tone.

The man it should rightfully belong to.

“Yes, Fitz.”

When she turns towards him they’re suddenly closer than she had expected, nearly face to face, a week ago she would have pressed up onto her toes and taken the excuse to kiss him. Now she hovers there, they both do, unsure of what to do in their proximity to each other.

He recovers first, “Get lunch with me?” 

“Okay,” she says, because what else is there to say. 

What other option was there. 

They take their lunch in a private corner, just the two of them, tucked away from the rest of the world. And  _ this  _ is familiar. This is them, as they have always been, since the academy. 

If she ignores everything she’s learned this past week, it could still be them. Together, here in a place where nothing else matters.

“What’s your plan,” she says, because she has to ask. 

“What plan,” he replies, sounding genuinely confused. 

“Your evil Hydra plan to take over SHIELD and be awful or-”

He laughs.

Honestly, laughs. 

She can’t help but reflexively smile too.

“I’m still trying to figure that to be honest,” he says after a moment, “I don’t have contacts here, and your world’s pathetic excuse of Hydra is a disappointment. If I’m being entirely honest, I don’t know where I go from here. I’m not used to that. Not knowing what to do, it was so much easier before-”

“Because AIDA was guiding you.” 

He doesn’t correct her name usage. 

“No one was controlling me. I made my own decisions, and I live and die by them.”

“It wasn’t a real world.”

“You people keep saying that, but I am not real,” he asks her, “Here and now, am I not a man, with a lifetime’s worth of experiences in a world different from you own. Am I not human?”

“You are,” she says, “And you make your own decisions now.”

“I always have.”

She doesn’t fight that.

Instead she says, “You could stay here with us,” the  _ with me _ , is understood even if unsaid. 

“I don’t know if that’s for the best.” 

“You’re not loyal to Hydra here,” she says, instead, “You’re a scientist.”

“I don’t like inhumans,” he’s blunt when he says it, honest, “I’ve been raised to hate them, to fear them, that sort of thing doesn’t just go away, Jemma.”

“You called me Jemma.” 

“I guess I did.” 

 

*

 

She wants him to stay.

Not because he’s her Fitz, because he’s not, he’s so clearly not.

But because a part of her likes this version of him.

Even if she can’t fix him.

There’s no doubt in her mind that there’s still good in him. There in his core. 

He’s still the same man at heart.

So she kisses him, standing in their lab, eager and desperate because she needs him, she always has. And he kisses her back in a way that is different that what she’s used it, but exactly what she didn’t know she needed.

He kisses her in a way that could be familiar one day.

  
  



End file.
